Our view of sustainability

For us, sustainability means conducting business responsibly to ensure long-term success in harmony with the environment and society. We are moving toward our goals by making sustainability a firmly integrated aspect of our operations and by requiring and promoting a strong sense of responsibility for sustainable operations among all of our managers and employees throughout the Group. We include our business partners in this process and conduct a dialogue on these issues with our stakeholders. Our management structures, processes and systems are designed in accordance with this concept of sustainability. All of our behavior is based on legality and integrity. As one of the world’s foremost automakers, Daimler has a clear claim to leadership in the field of sustainability.

Our sustainability strategy

We have developed a Group-wide sustainability strategy to enable us to meet the requirements associated with sustainability, and we systematically pursue the sustainability goals we have set for ourselves. This strategy is embedded in our corporate strategy, which is based on our four core values of passion, respect, integrity and discipline. We can only ensure sustained profitability and society’s acceptance of our business activities if we take into account the impact all of our business processes have on the environment and society, and if we align our business targets with environmental and social requirements.

Our sustainability strategy has six core aspects (“dimensions of responsibility”), to which relevant areas have been assigned where action needs to be taken. We have linked them with targets and target indicators. Together, all of our goals and targets serve as the basis for our medium- to long-term Sustainability Program, which we use to measure our performance, although we wish our performance to be judged externally as well. Our “Sustainability Program” also defines the areas in which we plan to take action in the coming years. For example, we aim to further reduce pollutants and emissions, further enhance the safety of our vehicles, and further expand and more systematically structure our efforts to protect human rights. We also seek to improve our dialogue with our suppliers and dealers and to further strengthen our social commitment.

Our business activities are also strongly guided by the ten principles of the UN Global Compact, to which we are firmly committed as a founding member. We are also a member of the Global Compact LEAD Group. Our internal principles and guidelines are based on this international reference framework as well as on other international principles.

We are committed to both legal and ethical standards and must ensure that these standards are adhered to around the world — also by our business partners and suppliers.

Road traffic is one of the causes of CO2 and pollutant emissions. As an automobile manufacturer, we work to promote sustainable mobility solutions and have demonstrated our innovative capability with regard to environmental and resource protection and safety.

Our operations impact the environment, and this is especially the case in vehicle production. We therefore employ a consistent system of environmental management in order to minimize this impact.

As a corporate citizen, we seek to contribute to the common good beyond the level of our business operations, and we utilize our special expertise in order to achieve this goal.

Group-wide sustainability management

At Daimler, sustainability is thematically and organizationally embedded in our Group-wide corporate governance activities. (See Corporate Governance Report) The Corporate Sustainability Board (CSB) is the central management body for all sustainability-related issues. The operational work is conducted by the Corporate Sustainability Office, which is staffed by representatives of the specialist departments and divisions. Since 2011, we have been using the Sustainability Scorecard as a tool for steering our efforts to meet key sustainability targets. The scorecard uses a color-coded system either to display the success of quantitative indicators and qualitative objectives or to show that action needs to be taken. This allows targeted measures to be taken with the direct involvement of corporate management.

Comprehensive reporting on sustainability

The new sustainability report on financial year 2015 will be presented at Daimler’s Annual Shareholders’ Meeting in early April 2016. The report will be published exclusively in digital form for the first time, which means it will be available for viewing at any time on the Daimler corporate website. The report provides a detailed and comprehensive sustainability balance sheet for the previous financial year. All of the key facts and figures will also be published in a brochure. (See daimler.com/sustainability)

The new sustainability report was drawn up in line with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines “4.0 — Comprehensive.” In this context, Daimler specifically highlights all of the company’s key sustainability-related issues. This applies in particular to current focal topics such as further reductions in the emissions of our vehicles, our position on the introduction of new test cycles in Europe and our extensive activities to assist refugees. We also focus on those issues that our periodic materiality analyses have determined to be of great importance to our stakeholders and ourselves. These include our activities to protect human rights, measures to further reduce the CO2 emissions of our vehicles and the development of innovative vehicle and drive-system technologies.